


What's in a name

by Ark



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Missing Scenes, Past established Relationship, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:54:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve doesn’t resist. He is dipped back: a dance.</p><p>“Bucky,” says Steve.</p><p>The severely serene surface does not stir. “You will answer the questions I ask.” The Soldier's voice is Bucky’s but the accent is all wrong. His face is Bucky’s, perfect, and all wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's in a name

**Author's Note:**

> A missing scene I needed between the causeway and the helicarrier. Thanks to all who told me to write it, and to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and Sebastian Stan's abdomen.

The Soldier appears from thin air because he is a ghost. He crushes Steve up against the alleyway wall before Steve has drawn breath.

He disables Steve with steady familiarity. His hands know where to go, where and how to hurt. He knows Steve’s body. He bends it back. 

The Soldier has Steve’s throat held in his metal hand, fingers like shackles. His knee is set to the curve of Steve’s spine; he need only keep bending to break Steve in half. 

Steve doesn’t resist. He is dipped back: a dance.

“Bucky,” says Steve.

The severely serene surface does not stir. “You will answer the questions I ask.” His voice is Bucky’s but the accent is all wrong. His face is Bucky’s, perfect, and all wrong. 

“Sure, why not,” says Steve, as though it’s the old days, and they’re deciding on whether to indulge at the dime theater or at the automat around the corner. Steve also has the same face he had seventy years ago -- only now made perfect, and all wrong.

The Soldier nods, tightens his cold hand to show Steve its deadly responsive capability, then says, “How do you know me?”

“You’re my best friend,” says Steve, unflinching. He refuses to use the past tense in that regard. “We grew up together, looked out for each other, fought the same fights.” 

The Soldier’s features are foreign because Bucky was never so impassive, never unmoved. Bucky was always moving, talking, laughing, smiling, teasing, whistling the latest tune from the radio. Bucky knew all the best dance steps and practiced with Steve in darkened dance halls on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where no one minded because everyone else there was like them or curious. Bucky never minded Steve’s two left feet. 

“What do you know now?” asks the Winter Soldier.

Everything, once. Now, nothing. “Nothing more than what’s in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s file, which I expect you know too,” Steve manages. “Look, Bucky--”

“That’s not my name.” Still, the iron grip loosens a fraction. Bucky is a magical word, Steve knows; invoking it has power. The Soldier wants to know: “Why did that man leave your service?”

If Steve closes his eyes, he thinks the Soldier will be done with him and snap his spine, so he keeps them open. He doesn’t want to bend to this, though. Wants to look away. Doesn’t want to see. Doesn’t want to retell it. Doesn’t need to be on a rushing train in freezing heights, same he is every night in his nightmares. “You fell in action. You were declared missing, presumed dead.” Fallen.

“Your best friend,” parrots the Soldier, cruelly, and Steve shivers not at the accusation but at the mocking tone, more Bucky than KGB. Bucky could be cutting and mean when he had to be, or when he was exhausted, like most people; the twist to the Soldier’s mouth is Bucky’s. Bucky patented it. “America’s hero couldn’t retrieve one lost man?”

“I had only just retrieved you,” says Steve. “Your liberation from captivity was my main mission in Europe, and once you were back at my side we were unstoppable. Then you sacrificed yourself defending me, and bigger things. You were lost in some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth.” 

Not that this had stopped Steve. No commands or orders or threats stopped Steve in his search. He had combed the mountains where Bucky fell for jagged brutal days he would forget if he could. 

The serum was faint protection against the arctic cliffs. Tears made tracks of ice on his cheeks. White-out conditions meant that Steve could barely see where to put one foot next, let alone what he was looking for. He sobbed and searched and sometimes screamed Bucky’s name, though he knew he was on a salvage rather than a rescue operation. The wind howled back and brought avalanches.

“I tried,” says Steve, unwilling to let it be suggested he had not. He had been buried in the same snow, and at times considered going to sleep there, to rest with the assurance that Bucky was nearby. 

I failed, Steve wants to say, but he lets the words catch beneath the vise of the Soldier’s new hand. It is the only part of Bucky’s body that Steve does not know, but it is part of him now. Steve does not resist its flex.

The Soldier shrugs. He speaks with a return to dispassion. The wry twist is gone from his lips. “Why do I want you? Is it a sort of conditioning?” His chrome arm exerts pressure, as though he can shake the truth from Steve. The Soldier has a theory: “A clever trick to compel loyalty in subordinates.”

Steve’s heart stops. Bent over backwards, he’s looking at the Soldier’s face upside-down, and when he looks again, he sees that the briefings were wrong. Natasha was wrong. They’re all wrong.

The impassivity is an act. It’s gorgeously done, but Bucky’s face is the face Steve has looked at most, gazed into and kissed and drawn. Steve was the first to kiss that mouth; he has done far more with that mouth. 

The Soldier is not uncaring, is not a void; he is a man roiled with contradictions, and Steve knows just how to read them. There, the nervous flutter under the Soldier’s left cheekbone: frustration. Confusion. Doubt.

Desire. The Soldier desires him.

The world resumes focus. Steve’s heart restarts.

He answers honestly as the other questions, though it hurts more than the train. He has trouble breathing, for all that the Soldier’s grip has relaxed dangerously. Steve should escape. 

“We were in love,” Steve says instead. On this, he won’t speak to the present. This man is still Bucky, he knows, he believes that there is a man who responds to Bucky within the Winter Soldier, but their golden age is over and dead. Buried with everyone they knew. “Had been most our lives, since we were kids.”

The Soldier considers this with a head-tilt, nothing more or less. “Not a likely backstory for the American champion.”

Steve’s smile is big and beaming. “Whaddya know about America, friend? Now Bucky Barnes, that is, James Buchanan Barnes, he knew just about every thing there was to know about the history of the good ol’ U.S. of A. You see, Bucky, Bucky always got teased about his full name, that’s why he went by Bucky; but he was sure to know lots about the president he was named for, to prove that you better shut your mouth and think twice about making fun of people. Bucky could sound off every president and their favorite dog --” 

_Bucky had a good mind for memorizing idle facts, and his self-interest in names led to further research._

_“Steven,” he said seriously one night, while they read library books in bed, “your name means crowned, wreathed, victorious. What did I tell you. It’s in your stars. You’re gonna be big one day. What do you think of that?”_

_“What does your name mean?” asked Steve._

_“Nevermind,” said Bucky, turning the page. “It’s boring. Nothing like Steve.”_

Several vertebrae in Steve’s spine pop and resettle as The Soldier’s fierce clench reasserts. The Soldier says, “You speak too freely.”

“It’s a problem that I have.” Steve can scowl too. Can scowl better than most. Has made dictators quiver beneath his change of expression. He needs the Soldier to understand that Steve is prisoner by choice, a volunteer, and any escalation will be met with equal response and opposite action. 

Steve does not want violence, never does, but he must use it for the greater good; and the greater good does not permit for an unstable ghost to snap his neck in a fit of pique. “What was the question? Oh, yeah. You and me. You and me, Buck. You want me because seventy years ago we shared a flat, and the same dull day-jobs, and much better nights. We swore serious things to each other, said we’d be in it to ‘til the end. Maybe that’s not a thing that can be erased.”

“Tricks,” frowns the Soldier, dark eyebrows knitting in a familiar pattern. “Tricks and lies. The American way.”

“No,” Steve disagrees. “Our way is to protect our interests. Also we enjoy fireworks.”

The elbow that knocks back Bucky’s chin surely induces explosions behind his eyes. The cry of pain is too much to bear, so Steve focuses on the backflip over Bucky’s head, the neatly rounded kick to Bucky’s mid-back that sends him face-first into the wall. 

It is only when Steve has neatly reversed their positions, holding Bucky pinned to the hard brick, one fleshly hand behind his back and one of steel, bent back, that he realizes this man has become Bucky to him again, that the Winter Soldier has receded. 

Bucky fights him. Knows all the same tricks as Steve. They learned everything together. The struggle is short but fierce. The smell of his body’s perspiration is the same, seventy years on. Sweat tastes salt-sweet on Bucky’s skin. Steve keeps him immobile.

“Will you answer _my_ questions?” Steve asks.

“I have no answers,” says Bucky.

“Who are you?”

“Anyone.”

“What is your name?”

“I have a designation.”

“You have a name. James. What does it mean?”

Bucky’s mouth opens. The words emerge unbidden, as though coded into muscle memory, deeper than brainwashing can reach. “Supplanter. Usurper.” He pants, straining against Steve’s grip, testing his hold. “He who grasps the heel. A heel.”

_“A heel. A heel!” Bucky gasped, his head thrown back, flushed and laughing. Straining and panting. Steve buried inside him, holding Bucky’s hands pinned to the bed. Both of them pretending like Steve had the strength to keep Bucky down. Steve’s slow, teasing thrusts, his vow not to come, not to let Bucky come, until Bucky told him what his name meant. “You get crowned victory and I’m James the heel. It also means underminer. Supplanter. Usurper. So you better watch your back, Steve.”_

_Bucky’s bold grin, his smiling eyes. He had broken free, used his superior strength to roll them over, fast as lighting; Steve laid out underneath him, Bucky on top, Bucky riding towards an explosive end for them both._

_“What does Bucky mean?” Steve asked after, tucked warm against Bucky’s chest._

_“A male deer,” said Bucky. “Not a word outta you, Rogers.”_

_“My lips are sealed, dearest.”_

_Bucky’s groan was heard in most of Brooklyn and parts of Queens until Steve kissed him quiet._

“You remembered,” Steve tells Bucky. Now Steve has the strength to pin Bucky down. He wishes he could relax his grip. It aches to hold onto Bucky so incorrectly. There was a time when Steve thought he would never get to touch this body again, and the crushing weight of trying to come to terms with that had flattened him. Now, a boon he never could have conceived of: Bucky alive, Bucky still buried but not dead -- yet the only way he is able to touch Bucky is through violence. It feels abhorrent. 

“I must’ve read it somewhere,” says Bucky, though he sounds uncertain. 

“You did. In a library book called _What To Name The New Baby_ that we got strange looks for checking out. You read it next to me in bed, often out loud. You’d never shut up about the names--”

“Stop,” says Bucky, struggling anew in Steve’s grip. “Let me go. End this now.”

It’s supposed to be a challenge, but it sounds like a plea. Steve’s stomach twists into knots. He can read the tone of Bucky’s voice as well as his expression, and the tone is desperate, pushed past all limits and endurance. Bucky has endured unfathomable horrors, first in a short, furious war, then in a lengthy, protracted one. 

Bucky has been to war every day of his life since he left Steve behind in Brooklyn. When he has not been fighting and killing he has been frozen, suspended apart from the world, always an alien visiting. His life is blood and chaos. To a man who has only known war, humans are beasts, the natural order is destruction, and speculation of hell is a joke, because it is already real.

Bucky wants it over with, wants the battle finished. 

Some would consider it an act of mercy to relieve Bucky from the control of his captors and his demons forever. Bucky has been broken and put back together too many times, and there are deep fissures showing. When Bucky cranes his head around, his eyes are big and begging Steve to do it. End this. 

Steve has never passed up a fight in his life. Never backed down. But he is the one to look away. Won’t fight Bucky like this. Can’t. “Let me help you,” says Steve. Let me help myself. “There are people I know in New York--”

Bruce and Tony, a sort of far-off salvation, gleaming in Tony’s glittering tower. If he can get Bucky to them, not even S.H.I.E.L.D. will challenge Stark security. Tony’s computer friend can find out all there is to know about Bucky, and Bruce will run biological tests and divine cures, and Tony could invent a machine to reverse what has been done to Bucky. 

His brilliant, flawed friends will understand and protect them and figure out a way, Steve needs to believe. Steve has always relied on the aid of able teammates to round out his ignorance and supplement his strength. He has help. He can help.

“No.” Bucky shakes his head, eyes lined with shadows. “No. No more experiments. No more tests. No more scientists, no more needles, no more wires, no--” Beneath the lids his gaze is going shocky.

Steve lets him go. He braces for impact, has the strange sensation of wishing he wore his shield and knowing it would not defend him. 

Bucky turns to face him, rotating the shoulder of his metal arm, which had been wrenched. “My orders are to kill you,” he says.

“Yet here I am, still alive.” Steve lifts his hands, shows empty palms. “Seems to me they didn’t take.”

The face-off makes his chest hurt and his throat close, worse than any physical attack, which Steve is primed to receive and counter. There is no strategy here. He thought he knew sorrow and agony and loss, but his short life has been simple compared to this. 

All his worst nightmares used to end with Bucky falling. That Bucky could fall, and live, and be made to hunt him, is so far beyond the realm of his capacity that Steve is still not entirely certain that this is real. If he wants it to be real.

On the causeway, after the Soldier’s mask came off, Steve thought for sure this was it for him. He had finally, irrevocably snapped. He knew the symptoms of the battlefield maladies better than anyone; he could help Sam counsel at the VA if he wasn’t so desperately in need of counselling himself. He had the nightmares, the days that were even worse, and he tried to stay active to escape it, tried to stay useful, tried to outrun it, but shellshock finally found him, thought Steve, seeing Bucky’s face grafted onto his all-too-formidable foe. 

If he hadn’t been about to die, Steve would’ve started laughing, that his brain was kind and crazy enough to show him Bucky one more time before it was all over. 

Then the name, so well-known, so beloved, had slipped out unbidden, when Bucky’s face did not change and become an enemy’s, no matter how long Steve stared. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Winter Soldier had replied, but he’d shaped Bucky’s name like Bucky did when he said, “Bucky Barnes, pleased to meet you, ma’am,” to a pretty dame or her mother. 

Bucky took extra care to be seen flirting with girls and taking them out to pictures, dragging Steve along when the girl had a friend. Steve never liked the charade, but Bucky said it was safer to have some cover, plus the ladies got a meal and a dance with no funny business whatsoever. They acquired the reputation of being perfect gentlemen, kissed the girls goodnight and went home and tore into one another with a hunger that never abated. That does not abate.

Steve had looked at the face on the causeway and known then that he was not hallucinating, though he crossed in that moment from one new world into the next. A world that contained Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. 

“You won’t find me,” says Bucky then, instead of “don’t look,” understanding innately that Steve doesn’t react well to being told what to do. 

Steve shrugs, as though he can be nonchalant with Bucky breathing down his neck, still squared off, so deadly, so alive, so close. “Before Europe, seems to me it was you who did the finding. Always knew just where and when to turn up to get me out of hot water. Used to say you were like a homing pigeon. Had a magnet for me.” 

If Bucky were still capable of his famous laughter, it would start in the corner of his mouth, just like that. The barest quiver of lip is visible. Then it flattens. “I will be made to complete the mission. When they know what I know, they will never stop sending me. You are compromised.”

“I’m counting on it,” says Steve.

Three things happen extremely fast:

Bucky kisses him, bringing their bodies together in a crushing, bracing embrace. It is a kiss, and a blow; it is delivered with all the relentless force of a body primed for destruction. Bucky’s mouth lands hard on his, and their teeth clash jarringly; Bucky’s teeth draw blood on Steve’s lower lip. But it is a kiss. Bucky is kissing him, his electric blue eyes open wide and on overload, too bright.

Steve stands kissed, not daring to move a muscle, at perfect attention. His heart thuds noisily in his breast, thawing out. He hadn’t realized it was still frozen. 

Then he kisses back. The first time Bucky kissed him, he’d been nearly as shocked, and it had taken all of two seconds to return the sentiment. It takes Steve two seconds now.

He kisses Bucky back the way Bucky liked being kissed, easing his tongue into Bucky’s mouth when Bucky lets him. He tastes like Bucky still; they haven’t been able to alter that. Bucky’s tongue engages and retreats, relearning. Steve shows him the way things were.

“Captain Steven Rogers,” whispers Bucky as he pulls back. “Steve.” 

He says the name like he’s been wanting to say it for a long time. This is the second thing that happens.

The third is the metallic grip on Steve’s arm that contracts and whirrs and lifts and jerks and sends him flying twenty feet through the air. It is a considerate sort of toss, high and curved, giving Steve plenty of time to tuck and roll a landing. It is considerate, Steve tells himself. Bucky could’ve thrown him into the wall, or knocked him out with a punishing fist to the jaw. 

Instead he throws Steve free of him and runs. Since he is no longer a ghost he cannot disappear, and Steve watches how he vanishes: a leap to catch a fire-escape ladder, a swing that sends him up to the second story of the structure, a third jump that lands him on the rooftop. Bucky does not look back, though he pauses a moment on the edge, his hair flagging in the wind, as though considering it. Then he is gone.

Steve sits down where he is, on the pavement. He sits a good while. 

He decides that when all of this is over, he’ll go back to Brooklyn. If it’s in a pine box, it’s in a box. If he survives it, he’ll go back to Canarsie, to the same broken-down block where they lived for a year that would encompass their happiness for the next ninety-five. Doesn’t matter that all the neighborhoods have changed, that shiny new condos are going up in the fields where they played ball, that all the creeks are toxic now. 

He’ll tell everyone else that he has gone to look for Bucky, that Bucky is on the run, lost. Steve will be in Brooklyn, waiting to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> O! be some other name:  
> What’s in a name? that which we call a rose  
> By any other name would smell as sweet;  
> So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,  
> Retain that dear perfection which he owes  
> Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;  
> And for that name, which is no part of thee,  
> Take all myself.
> 
> \--Romeo and Juliet, Act II. Scene II.
> 
> Come say hey on [Tumblr](http//et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com.com/). We have cookies and Winter Soldier manicures.


End file.
